Infrastructure wiring in the walls adds significantly to the excitement of the home. Having the wire in place for connecting computers, security cameras, home theaters, closed circuit channels, and a host of automation features, makes it so you can take advantage of new and exciting equipment when it becomes available. The time to get this wire in place is when the walls are open.

STRUCTURED WIRING
HOME BEAUTY MORE THAN SKIN DEEP

Infrastructure wiring in
the walls adds significantly to the excitement of the home. Having the
wire in place for connecting computers, security cameras, home theaters,
closed circuit channels, and a host of automation features, makes it so
you can take advantage of new and exciting equipment when it becomes
available. The time to get this wire in place is when the walls are
open.

The beauty of a home goes more than skin deep for today's life styles. Home
theater, computer networking, closed circuit video channels, HDTV, web surfing,
and impressive security features are all a part of making a home exciting to the
senses. These features require a lot of infrastructure placed deep within the
walls. The time to get the special wires in the walls to support the convenience
and excitement of today's and tomorrow's technologies is when the walls are open
ˆ either during a remodel or during new construction.

That brings us to the fundamental philosophy of structured wiring. Wire is
cheap. Opening walls is expensive. Put in ten times the amount of wire that you
will use at any one time. This provides the capacity and flexibility for the
future needs of your home.

If you buy into that concept, then structured wiring makes sense for you.

WHAT IS STRUCTURED WIRING?

Structured wiring is a method of providing the communications infrastructure of
your home in a well organized, easy to understand, and thorough way to provide a
general solution to your present and future needs. Rather than run a coax here,
and a Cat 5 there, and another coax somewhere else as you guess at the future
needs, the structured approach is to consistently run a full bundle of wire to
every significant room. The full structured bundle consists of two 4-pair Cat 5
cables and two coax cables (usually quad shield RG-6), and optionally two
multi-mode optical fibers. There are other structures, but this is the
configuration that has overwhelmingly become the standard.

WHY THE 2-2 STRUCTURE?

The two coax cables provide a down stream and an upstream signal path. You
can get just about everything you want down a single coax including cable
channels, satellite signals, and your own closed circuit channels for your front
porch, front yard, and back yard cameras. The upstream cable is used to carry
additional closed circuit channels, such as a baby crib camera, or a VCR feed to
your video distribution hub so that any TV in the house can tune to these feeds.

The two Cat 5, 4-pair telecommunication cables provide four phone lines and a
separate full capability computer network backbone for your home. Cat 5 wire
will support 100BaseT Ethernet networks, which are the standard for office and
home multi-computer networks. It also provides the link for high speed ISDN, DSL,
and Cable Modem connections to the Internet.

In the 2-2-2 structure, where there is also a pair of fibers, the use is not
as clear. Many people include the fiber for their home just because it is not
very costly if it is left dark (no connectors applied). Then they have it for
the future. At the present, very few people use fiber lines in a residential
setting. The twisted pair, high speed, Cat 5 networks are much less expensive,
and much more plentiful on the market. Fiber has its place in large commercial
applications where the runs for multi-building campuses are more than 90 meters
˜ the limit for twisted pair Ethernet.

UNIFORMITY AND APPEARANCE ARE KEY VALUES

Structured cabling systems are preparation for the future. They provide the
additional capacity and flexibility to take care of the changing needs in a
house. Much of their value is in how easy they are to understand by the
homeowner or anyone who needs to make a change.

When a son or daughter heads to college and the parents consider converting
the bedroom to a home office, it is easy with structured wiring. There is no
question about how to install and integrate phone and computer systems into that
room. The wiring is there. It is a simple job of plugging patch cords at the
distribution panel. Want to move the office to another room, just re-patch the
connections . . . a two-minute job. Need to set up a baby crib observation
camera and assign it to an in-house CCTV channel? Again it is a two-minute job.

The two-minute job applies if the panel is well organized and easy to
understand. In recent years many well known companies have entered the
structured wiring market. Future Smart, Leviton, Channel Vision, and Open House
are leading names in this industry. They are all good. There are clear
differences between them in how they are visually organized and the
configuration options they offer.

With
the large choice of head end panels available, it is worth looking at several to
make your own choice. It is good to find a firm that carries more than one line.
The panels vary significantly in price. The more costly ones provide better
visual organization. The economy ones are difficult to understand to all but a
qualified technician. Most all of panels get the job done from a purely
technical standpoint.

The added value provided by the higher end panels is that most homeowners can
understand what is going on just by looking at the visual layout. This means
that ten years later when a homeowner wants to convert a college kid's bedroom
to a home office, they can easily make the changes at the panel without needing
the help of a technician. When the house changes hands, the new homeowner can
easily understand structured wiring system. Lower cost panels, on the other
hand, can be quite intimidating to a homeowner. The difference in cost between
the economy models and the well-organized panels is usually just a few hundred
dollars.

PASSING THE FIVE YEAR TEST

We evaluate a panel's visual organization with our 5-year test. It is simple.
Look at the panel. If you think in five years you can walk into the room, look
at the panel, and immediately understand how it is configured and how to
reconfigure it, then it passes the 5-year test. The Future Smart Pro series
panels do an excellent job of passing this test. The superb organization does
add to the cost of the panel, but the little additional investment gives
valuable pay back in the future when you want to make a change.

The best on the market for organization are the Future Smart Networks. They
were the early pioneers in structured wiring. These panels are well laid out,
carefully organized, and extremely easy to understand. They are organized for
visual simplicity. The top section consists of rows of color coded connectors.
Each row connects to the cable going to a single room. The rows are called
zones. There is nothing between the connectors on the panel and the connectors
in the room except wire. Nothing is hidden. No confusion. Below the zones is a
row called a service-input hub. That's where the lines coming into the house are
located. The telephone company lines, the TV cable, the off-air antenna, and
satellite lines are here. There are distribution hubs for telephone, TV, and
satellite that make it easy to connect the incoming lines to the zones, or room,
with simple patch cords. When you look at the panel, it is very easy to see how
the house is connected. Five years later it is still very understandable. That's
the beauty of this system over others.

OTHER SYSTEMS

Both Channel Vision and Open House provide very cost effective panels. They
are excellent choices for owners who are comfortable with technical wiring. They
both offer a wide range of easy to install features.

WHEN THE WALLS ARE OPEN

The important thing in getting the beauty of your house to go below the
surface is to get the infrastructure wire in before the walls are closed up. It
is much more difficult to put wire in later. Before your walls are closed, all
you need to install is the wire and the mud rings or cut-in rings to mount the
connector plates. If you prefer a flush mounted panel, then the installation can
go in at this time too. All of the rest of the material gets installed after the
walls are closed up and painted. This later work is called the trim out phase.

GOOD PLANNING

Planning is very important. Fortunately it is easy. The time many do it is
when the framing begins. This is a good time because the lead times on the
structure wire technology products is short (usually in stock at good
distributors) and the installation of the wire occurs after the rough electrical
is completed, but before the walls are closed up. The advantage in waiting until
the framing has started is that you will have knowledge of the latest products
available to you. Extremely early planning usually results in re-planning, as
new products become available. You can usually get help with the planning from a
qualified installer or from your equipment supplier.

SELECTING AN INSTALLER

Low voltage infrastructure wiring requires special knowledge that is
different than conventional power wiring. Some of the electrical contractors
have gone through the process of learning these new technologies and offer them
as a standard part of their services. This is more often the exception than the
rule. If you are considering using a regular electrical contractor, make sure he
or she has been through training on infrastructure wiring technologies. If he or
she has not, find a firm that specializes in this type of work. If you are
handy, you may want to consider doing some of the work yourself. It will take
some special training and about $200 for special tools, but many homeowners are
doing the labor themselves.

BEAUTY BENEATH THE WALLS

Infrastructure wiring in the walls adds significantly to the excitement of
the home. Having the wire in place for connecting computers, security cameras,
home theaters, closed circuit channels, and a host of automation features, makes
it so you can take advantage of new and exciting equipment when it becomes
available. The time to get this wire in place is when the walls are open.

Richard Gensley is a founder of HomeTech Solutions, a company that
distributes a wide range of home automation products. He has a long background
in operations management for firms in various types of automation technologies.

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